Nashville teacher raises $1,000 to take kids to see 'Hidden Figures'

Correction: The names of Barlin Munday and Tayveon Lynch were misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

Before the school bus even reached the movie theater, Meredith Zepf had already started crying.

The Kirkpatrick Enhanced Option School teacher wanted to take her fourth-grade students — most of whom live in Nashville's government housing projects and some of whom have never been in a theater — to see the movie "Hidden Figures."

During Black History Month, she wanted her students to see what the United States looked like in the '60s and the racial tension that was experienced in the workplace and community. She also wanted her kids to see faces like their own — strong, smart black women and men — making a significant contribution to a historic moment.

But she couldn't afford the field trip.

Neither could her school.

Nor could most of her students' families.

So she did what any industrious, first-year teacher with big ideas and a big heart would do. She turned to the community for help.

In three days, she raised $1,000 through a crowdfunding site to take 60 kids from Kirkpatrick to the theater on Valentine's Day.

With a busload of children chattering in excitement, she couldn't hold back her tears of joy.

"You've got to dream big when you work in schools like I do," Zepf said after she entered the Regal 27 theater and began filling dozens of brown paper bags with popcorn for her students. "You've got to shoot for the moon."

The moon is exactly where the NASA space team was aiming. But before then, they had to get the launch and landing calculations and the spacecraft design correct to get into orbit.

Part of that mission fell to three women, whose story is depicted in the Oscar-nominated movie "Hidden Figures." There's Katherine Johnson, a numerical genius who hand-calculated the trajectories that helped astronaut John Glenn become the first American to orbit Earth. Dorothy Vaughan, who became NASA’s first black supervisor and an expert programmer in the early days of computers. And Mary Jackson, who would become NASA’s first African-American female engineer.

And they each had a lesson — decades later — for a group of Nashville fourth-graders.

The movie theater's marquee lights and neon signs provided a grand welcome for the students of Kirkpatrick, who marched in line through the theater wearing their red polo shirts and blue school uniform pants or skirts.

"Remember your questions," one teacher called as students streamed into the darkened theater. "Why is it called 'Hidden Figures'? What is the metaphor?"

With popcorn in their laps and soda in the seats' cup holders — treats funded through community support to make the experience extra special — the students giggled at the occasional swear word and snickered at a small kiss between characters. They clapped at moments of success when Glenn made it into orbit. But they also sat stunned and silent at some of the realities of segregation.

They saw a coffee pot labeled "colored" that no white person would drink from and water fountains with signs that said "white only." They watched as Johnson ran nearly a mile every day, sometimes through the pouring rain, simply to use the bathroom. She couldn't go where the white women went. Instead, she had to use the facility for black women in a basement far away from her desk.

And, a few days after the field trip, with the students back in their brightly decorated classroom where math equations are posted all over the walls, they talked about how that made them feel.

"Disgusted," said Tayveon Lynch.

"Angry," Jacques Battle added.

"I would feel unappreciated," Teona Dallas concluded. "It's not fair."

Segregation and racism, as they understand and experience it, isn't fair. Davion Miller-Matthews — a bright boy with a shining smile and who loves to build things (maybe even spaceships one day, though he really wants to construct houses for the homeless) — articulates what he knows about segregation.

"Whites and blacks are separated from each other, but whites have fancier things than colored people," he said.

And racism? Well, that's about a person of any type of color who is being picked on because they are not the same color as you.

"That word makes me feel mad, because there's no reason you should pick on someone just because they're not your color," Miller-Matthews said, his brow furrowing. "So what? It doesn't matter where they come from, what color they are, anything. Just like Martin Luther King said in his 'I Have a Dream' speech: 'Don't judge my four little children by their color, but judge them by their character.' "

And ideas like that are exactly what Zepf wanted her students to reflect on as they wrote essays about the movie's takeaways. She also wanted them to know that, despite the injustices they may face even at just 9 and 10 years old, they can still achieve.

"The movie ... it's a mirror," Zepf said.

It shows the kids faces like their own in places about which, right now, they can only dream.

They learned that, too.

Barlin Munday, in her quiet voice with focused eyes, talked about how she loves math. Just like the women in "Hidden Figures."

"I liked the part when she was doing the fractions," Munday said, her face showing a small smile.

Friend Isha Hassan also saw inspiration on screen as the character of Katherine Johnson climbed a ladder to work out equations on a giant chalkboard.

"The movie is about three girls who are smart," Hassan said. "They did what they wanted to do, and they worked hard."

Just as Zepf does every day for her students.

The reality is the movie was just one small gesture. Zepf provides so much more — backpacks and sweatshirts and socks for students who are without them. She has taken kids to the dentist to get cavities filled.

If they need it, she gets it.

Now, through a seemingly simple field trip, she has gotten them something they may not have known they needed — and a lesson they cannot do without.

"Thank you for taking my whole entire class to the movies," Miller-Matthews said in a message to his teacher. "And trying your best."

Reach Jessica Bliss at jbliss@tennessean.com or 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.